From OPEN ACCESS to... Open Science & Open Data

During the 22nd edition of the International Conference in ELectronic PUBlishing and the 10th anniversary of the meeting in Toronto, Canada, 22-24 June 2018, the Open Access conversation has been extended to Open Science and Open Data. The sustainability of Open Science infrastructures and ongoing community ownership and control of the Knowledge Commons were major themes at ELPUB 2018. The SCOSS initiative (SCOSS: A global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) was introduced to participants, working towards guaranteeing financial sustainability for existing Open Science/Open Access initiatives, addressing the issue of financial sustainability.

Dr Aled Edwards – an expert scientist in structural biology (and pharmaceutical sciences) - delivered a keynote on Open Science for Public Good. Some key messages from his presentation on Open Science include:

Open Science:

leads to competitive scientific outcomes and reproducible science;

helps build trust with the public and with patients;

reduces redundancy, which in turn accelerates research (which is good, since redundancy makes drug discovery less efficient – the drug price is high because it includes the price of failure and redundancy, which could have been avoided if science was open);

is a transparent way to recruit people (you can actually see people’s work!);

is sustainable - pharmaceuticals WILL fund open science. This isn’t going to lead them to a drug in the next 5 or 10 years, but it will enable research in other understudied areas. Open drug discovery may be the key to fixing the broken pharmaceutical model and to developing personalized medicines. All have to be collaborative about the funding structures. Governments always care about themselves, often thinking: “How do we make sure country X [us] wins and not country Y [them].” But open collaborations with industry enables academics to learn the market, spot commercial opportunities and launch companies. This should lead to benefit the country first of all;

is the solution, and should not just be the aim.

An example of an Open Science initiative shared by Dr Edwards: Extreme Open Science Initiative: A team of groundbreaking scientists at SGC, UNC and INSERM are now sharing their lab notebooks online.

ORCID Public Data File 2018 contain a snapshot of all public data in the ORCID Registry associated with an ORCID record. ORCID publishes this file once per year under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication